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An inertial measurement unit is a system which contains sensors(accelerometers,
gyroscopes, magnetometers) and does something called ‘sensor fusion’ on the sensor
data obtained to allow you to keep track of orientation of whatever thing you put the
sensors on. Orientation or
attitude is how the body is placed in 3d space, more precisely it is 3d rotation(from a
reference zero rotation of the object) which is required to reach the current placement.
We can also keep track of the location of the object with the sensor data from the
sensors; keeping a track of the path/trajectory of the the body is also called
‘gait tracking’. If you google that, you will find some links from
X-io.co.uk, papers and some videos from Sebastian Madgwick. He has
also made some sample C code(and also matlab, C# etc) for the algorithm he developed
to efficiently calculate quaternion from aceel/gyro/mag data.

The algorithm is an optimization problem which minimizes error between calculated and
expected output. You should consider using that if you plan to use discrete sensors(as
opposed to using a IMU on a chip, which this post is about).

This post is about using a chip like Invensense MPU9150/MPU6050 etc. Which do most of the
heavy lifting and give you the quaternion orientation directly. These chips are very often
found in cellphones etc. Even oculus rift.

These chips can be used to read raw accelerometer and gyroscopes via their i2c interface,
but this is most useful when Invensense provided DMP(digital motion processor) driver is
used. Basically, mpu9150 and others contain a processor too, iirc its an 8051, but they
only provide a binary blob, which you have to upload to the mpu chip, after that, you can
use its (new) i2c commands to access and set parameters/readings. Documentation is again
provided only as sample code. (here is some barely working code for using this with a pic32
mpu9150-pic32. (not using compass)

The internal sampling rate for the sensors can be in kHz, but the sampling rate we want is
lower, so we can do other thing on our main procssor. (sleep, say in phones, to save
battery). You can set a rate of say 50Hz, and mpu will generate an interrupt every 20ms
and you can read quaternion/accel/gyro readings(they will be downsampled to 50Hz).

First basic application for these sensors used in few smartphone games are sensing tilt,
to say control a car in-game. What developers usually do in this application is use only
accelerometer readings. Since these are pretty noisy, they also first apply a low pass
filter, to smooth it out. But, this also has the side effect of adding a delay, causing
latency which can be even percieved, and also much less sensitivity to fast motions.

The solution is to use the quaternion output, or if not available direcly, calculate it.
Why this works much better is because: accelerometers are noisy but they give give readings
around actual value(i.e. have high frequency noise), and gyroscopes have a very nice
output, but it drifts(i.e. even when kept stationary, it might indicate that it
is rotating, at a slowly changing rate), or that gyroscopes have low frequency noise.
Different sensor fusion algorithms make use of these(somehow) to counter each other’s
noise.

To do this, first you need the initial/origin quaternion value(or, quaternion at position
which you consider to be initial). Need the initial one only to “reset” quaternion
into our preferred origin position. This is done by

q = q_cur * conjugate(q_origin)

this works because to compound to rotations, we multiply the quaternions, and to reverse
one rotation, we take the conjugate(negate the signs of components).

Now, we need to calculate tilts of x(1,0,0), y(0,1,0) and z(0,0,1) axes from the
orientation that corresponds to quaternion q calculated above. First though, we need
to also rotate the axes, by rotation corresponding to q_origin, because that’s our origin.

This rotates x axis(1,0,0) by rotation q_origin. (quaternions output from mpu represents
relative rotation from the moment it started calculations, not absolute orientation, so we
had to rotate our q_cur earlier by conj(q_origin)).

The modification is done just after we do q = q_cur * conjugate(q_origin). The angle can be calculated by:

xangle = acosf(quat_dot(q, xaxis))*180/pi , etc

This somehow gives half/(or double?) angle, have to check calculations for this. But it
gives the angle. Much much more accurate and responsive than low passing accelerometer
readings.

This is actually incomplete. The X, Y, Z axes are stuck in fixed direction, BUT we want our
angle reading to be Z-axis invariant, that means we want x and y axes to move with us.

One simple solution is to rotate our q_origin everytime before we do the above
calculations, by the inverse amount it has rotated in the Z-axis.

(Note that we are using zaxis before we are calculating it, so it means we have to
calculate zaxix = q_origin * z * conj(q_origin) when we are setting q_origin also)

Now when we calculate the tilts, they will be z-axis invariant, angles will be tilts from perfectly horizontal xy plane.

Another simple application is to use this to detect taps/thumps etc. Although mpu9150 has
code for doing this within the DMP, but it is written for(actually is in binary blob)
smartphones to detect taps i guess? It works, but it’s not very tunable and it didnt work
in some cases, like putting this in a box and detecting thumps, which I guess have
different signature(on accelerometer readings) tha taps on a phone.

To do this better, read accelerometer readings for the three axes, and keep a window(last n
values) of ax^2, ay^2, az^2.

For each time instant, calculate:

energy = sqrt( summation(ax^2) + summation(ay^2) + summation(az^2) )

(can leave out sqrt).

Then apply a threshld for miniumum value.

The third is gait tracking, which is not as trivial as above, coming up shortly.

The problem is to use an openwrt(applies otherwise too) installation to connect to an AP using wps, and to save the network details to save this setting. This does not work without modifications in Attitude Adjustment, and is not(yet) present in Bleeding Edge. Hopefully it will be supported sometime.

You need wpa_cli, (and I have tested with full wpa_supplicant package) to use wps_pbc (WPS push button method, which is the only one I have used, but others will probably too). WPS push button is in which the user pushes a button on both the AP, and on the client, and authentication etc. takes place w/o any more input form user, and client device connetct to the access point.

What is supposed to happen in a device is that the button push somehow sends wpa_supplicant the wps_pbc command. For host mode, openwrt wiki has an example which uses hotplug mechanism. A gpio button is used with the gpio_hotplug driver, so that it generates an even on button push and hotplug program catches it, ond a user script catches this event and sends wps_pbc to hostapd, like hostapd_cli -p /var/run/hostapd-phy0 wps_pbc.

The only difference in station mode is to send wps_pbc command to wpa_supplicant instead, as in wpa_cli -p /var/run/wpa_supplicant/ wps_pbc (path is different depending on openwrt release, or on some other distro).

To get network SSID, key, and encryption, though, the only way I could find was to have the setting update_config to be present in wpa_supplicant.conf file, which is not present in the configs generated by openwrt scripts in attitude adjustement and bleeding edge as of now. In attitude adjustment, you can edit wpa_supplicant.sh which generates the .conf from your UCI settings, to add update_config=1 in the file. In bleeding edge, i had to edit netifd.sh to do the same change.

Now when you connect to an AP succesfully, the config file will be updated with the current network parameters. You can grep these values, SSID, key can be used as it is(i think), and you may have to map the cipher to encryption which UCI config understands.

Update: It seems that WPS is not currently working with the AP being in WPA(or psk in uci syntax). It worls
nearly every time now that I changed this to WPA2/psk2. As of now there seem to be only 2 people interested in solving this issue, me and somebody who contacted me on twitter because of a forum post of mine on forums.openwrt.org.